


My Many Faces Are The Same

by entanglednow



Category: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-28
Updated: 2008-07-28
Packaged: 2017-10-23 07:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every day the suit gets a little harder to take off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Many Faces Are The Same

  
Every day the suit gets a little harder to take off. 

At first Billy doesn't want to. Dr. Horrible has the luxury of not feeling anything at all, and Billy left him to his moment of glory while he sat quietly at the back of his own head and fell apart inside.

But when he wipes the condensation off the mirror, he sees his own face, and almost doesn't recognise it. It's been a long time since he stared into his own eyes. It's starker and thinner; it's not used to soft any more, not used to uncertain, it looks odd staring blankly back at him. His own face looks alien now, it looks naked and strange. Less real somehow, than the reflective goggles of his own monstrous creation. It makes him laugh, a quick, tragic little laugh that hurts somewhere.

His eyes water, they're more sensitive to the light now. Dr. Horrible doesn't take the goggles off any more.

Billy thinks eventually he might be swallowed up completely. One day he'll drag off the goggles, and the coat, and there'll be nothing left underneath. Dr. Horrible will have seeped all the way under his skin. Not the Doctor Horrible he _was_ , not the one from before. When he just wanted someone to _see_ , he just wanted to show people what was wrong with the world. When he wanted to be someone. It was the ideas that were important.

It was, in the beginning.

The new Dr. Horrible, the new one is _alive_ , the new one is sharp like glass, the new one has gone past wishing the world was different, and into _making_ it different. The new one doesn't want to convince the world to change, he just wants to break it, one piece at a time.

The new one knows that it's not _how_ you laugh, but _when_ you laugh that matters.

And he doesn't have time to sleep.

It's Billy who wakes up in the basement, head pounding, slumped over formulas and equations that he's ashamed of, that he's _afraid_ of. And he'll have barely enough time to be himself again before the Evil League of Evil will demand him - will demand Dr. Horrible. He'll sit at their table, and listen to his own voice string together words like ' _hoses_ ' and ' _acid_ ' and ' _playground_ ' and people will clap approvingly, while he's lost somewhere in the _horror_ of it all.

He knows that he's not in control of this any more. He knows that when Penny died something broke, some important part of him that he didn't know he needed, until it's just not there any more. All that's left is the world through circles of glass. A world full of screaming people and ambition, and a quiet voice that whispers that Bad Horse doesn't _understand_ people, and someone who doesn't understand people can never truly destroy them, or own them.

Billy will stare through the goggles while his fellow members nod and make suggestions and Dr. Horrible will carefully catalogue every single one of their weaknesses.

It's like he's the only one in the world who notices he's gone insane. But how can that matter if you're the only one.

Billy's tired, he's so _incredibly_ tired. Too tired to protest, too tired to fight the sheer burning intensity that is this new darker, larger thing that owns him now. But Dr. Horrible won't let him sleep.

When he dreams Penny's still here, she's still here, but everything's the same. He's still lost in the red suit, teeth clenched so hard behind his smile that his jaw aches all through the night. And no matter how many times he tries to tell her that he's sorry, that he never meant her to get hurt, that he _knows_ it was all his fault but he never meant it.

He never wanted _that_.

It was her.

It _should_ have been her.

But she just looks at him like he's lost. Like there's nothing left to save. Because she knows what he's done, she knows what he is now. And Dr. Horrible looks through her like she's nothing, like she doesn't matter.

Billy always wakes up then, drags himself free of the dream, with a noise in his throat that never comes out, it just stays there, sharp and endless and painful, because everything is _wrong_.

He's left alone in his own bed with a life he doesn't know how to fix, a life that's tumbling terrifyingly fast, somewhere he thought he always wanted it to go.

And he can't make it _stop_.

When he looks up, he's staring into the mirror, and for a fraction of a second it's not Billy that looks back.

But out of the coat the world is too bright and too painful and it eats away at him in a thousand different ways, in a thousand places. Until he's left so full of nothing he can't breathe any more.

He has to put the coat back on just to stay sane.

Or to go mad again.

He thinks he finally knows what it feels like to desperately, _desperately_ want to be saved.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] My Many Faces Are The Same](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3645906) by [RsCreighton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton)




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